Chapter 57
Ivan found the tavern at the end of a road that smelled of wheat dust, horse sweat, and rain waiting somewhere beyond the hills.
It had no sign worth remembering. Only a crooked lantern above the door, a packed dirt yard churned to mud, and the sort of low, yellow windows that promised poor ale and poorer decisions.
He sat at the corner table with his back against the cold stone wall and a bottle of something the proprietor had called grain spirit in front of him, which was true in the sense that grain had at some point been involved in its history and a spirit was what it required, currently, to drink.
Ivan had been drinking for two hours and was not yet drunk in any way that mattered. That was the problem with this particular grade of liquor. It got him to the place where the edge had gone off the world and then refused to take him further, no matter how much he poured into the cup.
The tavern thickened around him.
Vredians came in from the cold in twos and threes, stamping snow from their boots at the lintel before shouldering their way toward the hearth.
The long room filled slowly with wet wool, tallow smoke, spilled ale, and the slightly rancid stew the woman at the fire was ladling into chipped bowls for men too hungry or too drunk to complain.
In the corner, a bard worried at the strings of a battered instrument as if tuning it might somehow improve the company.
Ivan knew where every man’s hands were within four paces of his chair. He knew who carried a weapon, and which fools mistook five cups of ale for courage. He knew, without bothering to count, that two men at the bar had recognized him the moment he walked in.
The Hunter had never been a beloved figure in Vredia. That had always been true. Since Dominic had granted him some measure of trust, it had become true with fresh enthusiasm.
The two men at the bar became four.
Ivan took another drink.
Promising.
He fingered the pin in his coat pocket without intending to—he had stopped intending to do this several days ago, when intending to do it had ceased to matter.
The pin was always in his fingers now. He would find his hand in his pocket without remembering having put it there—his thumb rubbing the small, cool length of pearl, the bent place where she had tried to take his eye with it once and the metal had given a little.
He smiled and turned it once, slowly, between thumb and forefinger.
The motion did not unstick anything in him; it only kept his hands occupied while the rest of him did the thing he had been doing in this corner for two hours, which was not thinking about her, by the laborious method of thinking about anything else.
He took a final draw on the twist of clove before grinding it into the table, watching the ember eat slowly through the wood.
Ivan was running out of fences to put around the place inside him where she lived.
He drank, which was a kind of fence. He thought about other things, which was a better kind of fence.
He fingered her pin in his pocket, which was…
not a fence at all—actually, it was the precise opposite of a fence; it was the small open gate in the middle of every fence he was trying to build—and he could not seem to make himself stop.
He took another drink and thought about the apparatus.
They had spent the past week putting the final touches on it.
Ivan had been in and out of the work whenever he was sober enough to be useful, which had been more often than the last two hours suggested.
The apparatus sat on a long table in the center of Algernon’s kitchen: a working model, one-sixth the scale of the final piece, but exact in every component.
He could close his eyes and walk the table by feel.
The basin sat at the center, hammered bronze, no wider than his hand in the model, though the final would span a man’s arm. Its inner surface was etched with the three-anchor stellar coordinates and the keying script. Three small spouts arched above it, fed by a brass reservoir.
That was where her blood would go.
Around the basin’s rim sat a ring of quartz: twelve octagonal prisms, each nested in its own bronze cradle.
Clear stone in the model, charged stone in the final.
Godfrey and Algernon had spent the last four nights tuning the twelve they had selected, one harmonic to each crystal—the chord meant to open the fold.
D. F-sharp. A. Low D. The fourth above. The dominant seventh. The suspended fourth.
Twelve held notes, twelve fixed pitches, twelve crystals each carrying one piece of a chord that, when struck together by twelve Vredians pouring their Draoth into twelve copper rods, would match the seal frequency of áine’s lock.
Childishly simple in the telling. Less so in the doing.
The apparatus would get them in. What collapsed the Fold behind them was something else entirely.
Algernon had taken to calling it the Last Note, though Ivan suspected he'd chosen the name for the way it sounded in conversation rather than for any precision it offered.
It was small enough to hide inside the hollow of his staff—a sliver of the same charged quartz as the twelve crystals, but cut wrong on purpose, faceted to hold a standing wave instead of releasing one.
Where the ring was built to sustain resonance, the Note was built to break it: a single point of contained instability waiting for a trigger.
The trigger was the part that had cost them four nights filled with arguments.
Ivan had wanted a slow bleed and Algernon had refused outright.
A Fold that knew it was dying would fight, and a fight gave Osin time to notice.
What they needed instead was collapse without warning—the wave function held intact until the instant it wasn't.
So, they had built the spell around that exact principle: a contained potential, a thing that was neither stable nor unstable until observed.
The keying word Ivan and Algernon worked out together did the observing.
Imbued correctly, it forced the Note's held wave to resolve, and a structure that had been suspended between two states collapsed entirely into one of them—not torn apart from outside, but decided, the way a coin stops being both faces the moment it lands.
In truth, it was the most complicated piece of working anyone in the realm had attempted in living memory.
Though Algernon’s models—beautiful, painstaking, a decade in the building—had never once struck the proper resonance.
The mathematics had given them the target pitch and the structure, but Ivan had learned this week that mathematics had not given them the engineering.
Before this week, Ivan had only known Godfrey as Osin’s personal Druid, and then later as the captive spy the rebellion had spent a year and an unforgivable number of dead men trying to retrieve. Ivan had known Godfrey mattered. But he had not understood why until now.
Godfrey had built the siphon—the mechanism Osin had used for ten years to strip Draoth from Sídhe bodies and crystallize it into the stones casters wore on their fingers.
It was the great work of Godfrey’s life under duress—the working he had been forced to refine across years he had not wanted to give, until, inch by miserable inch, he had built the most efficient engine for harvesting and wielding power any kingdom had ever seen.
And very soon, he was going to take that same engineering and run it backward.
Not stripping Draoth out, but pouring it in.
Ivan had watched them dry-run it twice.
The initial attempt failed before the hour ended. Gideon’s hold on the plate began to weaken, the chord slipped out of alignment, and Godfrey caught the shift half a breath too late. The practice seam buckled with a small, ugly sound.
Dominic stepped down from the central plate, gray-faced, his palms blistered raw.
“We do it again tomorrow,” he said calmly. “And tomorrow, it holds.”
So they had.
The second run carried them just past the hour before Godfrey eased the chord down and the cabinet closed cleanly. Afterward, three men had to be carried from the plates. Dominic walked to his quarters on his own, which fooled no one with eyes, and did not emerge for six hours.
Algernon had calculated they needed two hours at minimum: enough time to open the rift, cross into the fold, locate the substratic field, and destroy it before the working collapsed around them.
Godfrey called that estimate “touchingly ambitious,” and then spent ten minutes explaining all the ways optimism tended to get men killed.
No one had yet said the plainest truth aloud.
Before this was done, the Vredians would pay for the breach into the Fold in flesh.
Ivan set down the cup.
His hand fell to his thigh, near enough to the small knife sheathed inside his boot, as the largest of the four men finally found his courage and came stalking toward him.
A hauler, by the breadth of him. His knuckles were the size of walnuts.
He stopped on the far side of Ivan’s table and stood there a long moment, breathing through his nose.
“So,” the man said. “It was you.”
Ivan’s face gave away nothing. “You’ll have to be more specific. I’ve been accused of a great many things.”
“You’re the Hunter.”
“I was.” Ivan lifted the cup again. “Strictly speaking, I’ve been on leave.”
The man’s jaw worked. “My brother fought at Rookmere.”
Ivan paused with the cup near his mouth. Ah.
Rookmere. Fifty-two dead in the reeds, nine wagons burned, the river running black with blood beneath the bridge, men drowning beneath their own armor while Ivan and his men cut down those who tried to crawl out.
Osin had called it a clean strike. Ivan had watched a boy no older than seventeen try to hold his own insides in with both hands and thought there was no such thing.
“My condolences,” Ivan said.
The man’s face twisted. “You sick fuck.”